GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)

People live and think in the present, as an added plus people have terrible memory. Think in 5-20 years and use that timeframe to put the events one after another.

Who are they trying to fool? Wholesale expropriation after stripping the license and authorship, while those in the open source community observe both of them very carefully.

Give credit where credit is due, including paying the creators when the licensing is violated.

I think that the author has a warped idea of how LLMs work, and that infects its reasoning. Also, I see no mention of the inequality of this new "copyright free code generation" situation it defends; As much as Microsoft thinks all code is ripe for taking, I can't imagine how happy they would be if an anonymous person drops a model trained on all leaked Windows code and the ReactOS people start using it. Or if employees start taking internal code to train models that they then use after their employment ends (since it's not copyright infringement, it should be cool).

Focussing on the legal or procedural technicalities of how these systems work is in my opinion completely missing what the resistance is about. There is a difference between sharing your creation with your neighbor and sharing your creation with the corporate equivalent of those Matrix robots that turn people into batteries.

"Copyright law has only ever applied to intellectual creations – where there is no creator, there is no work."

This is the sort of thing that may be technically true but these kinds of rules were made under the assumption that most valued intellectual creations are indeed made by people, if you're going to argue that gigantic companies can use machines to basically launder intellectual artifacts, and that this doesn't compete with the interests of actual creators because technically ChatGPT isn't a legal person I think you're getting lost in legalese and missing the point

> The output of a machine simply does not qualify for copyright protection – it is in the public domain.

The machine, such as it is, is generally not acting on its own. A person operates the machine, and presumably is on the hook for infringement on some level.

Consider: what if one directs the machine to reproduce a specific body of code and it ostensibly does so. Was there copying?

What if I have a person read out that body of code and I type exactly what I hear? I used a machine to produce the resultant text file, but it's pretty clear that copying has occurred then.

FWIW, I'm not a copyright maximalist, but I don't think you can win a conflict by abstaining from playing the game the other team is playing. That is: the companies producing, and drawing incredible and exclusive economic value from, industrial scale plagiarism machinery are hardly going to stop ruthlessly enforcing copyright on their own proprietary software. It would seem best, if it's the goal, to get laws changed in advance of simply declaring, lopsidedly, that this is all fine.